The DailyNews
1 More to come.
2 I left off yesterday with those words, just prior to my version of the Christian “Amen”. My version of the Christian “Amen” is this: “Peace.”
3 At the last minute in yesterday’s DN, a whole bunch of pretty freaky, strange things happened.
4 I had finished writing the DN, went to my archives for photos, shot past a picture of Steve Jobs and noticed it had orbs on it.
5 Orbs are odd things. They are generally small, perfect circles of light that people usually can see, but which sometimes appear on pictures. Many believe them to be either ghosts, or the energy surrounding ghosts.
6 My orb philosophy has always been this: Small circles and odd things always appear on some pictures. Always have.
7 I never gave orbs a serious look until I looked at some ot the pictures in a rather shabbily-edited book called Haunts of San Jose.
8 I meantioned it a few days ago.
9 It has lots of pictures with lots of orbs.
10 I generally don’t believe in photo “ghosts” or “orbs” because cameras could always fool us. We’ve all had blurry pictures that have weird things on them.
11 A normal person dismisses them as some sort of camera anomaly.
12 I once accidentally took a picture of the right wall (audience right) of the Theatre.
13 It caught a teardrop-shaped moving light with a person’s face at the round end.
14 VERY freaky, as it was Halloween time. Naturally the students all thought I had caught Heidi on film.
15 I was always pretty careful of things like that, so I simply dismissed it as a weird camera shot. Cameras catch odd things, because the world is in constant movement.
16 People could see whatever they want in a snapshot, particulary one that is a possible double-exposure.
17 But the students at the time thought I had finally caught Heidi on film.
18 I was so skeptical that I’m pretty sure I threw that picture away just in the event that it would taint my credibility. I always tried to keep the stories separate from the young imagination, or from assuming everything had some sort of spiritual significance.
19 It was always hard enough just to list the facts without people thinking, “So what? It’s just the temperature changing when seats click,” and that sort of thing.
20 Or that the sound of the clicks is always consistent, whether it be the Theatre seats, a television, a chair, or the other day, a sliding door.
21 And I cop to that. But there are all sorts of clicks that don’t sound like those, and the Heidi “clicks” tend to occur much more frequently when I’m teaching about ghosts, and paranormal activity, the REAL paranormal activity, not some overblown blockbuster film.
22 So yesterday when I saw the picture of Steve Jobs with the orbs, I noticed that they were perfect circles, which I had never noticed about orbs until this year. The ones in that picture struck me as being interesting because they seem to be perfect circles. I just don’t put much into photographs of “ghosts”.
23 It was just that they appeared at a moment when I was about ready to put the DN to bed for the night.
24 I then eagerly clicked another arrow that shot my pictures to their earliest days, where I had taken pictures of some sort of Christmas celebration we had in YB’s Theatre a few years ago. One picture was of three former students chilling on a couch at center stage, no ghosts or anything. The second was of one student standing in front of Theatre lights which passed through her like some Spielberg shot, eerily mimicking the rays that shot through Jobs in the two photos of him that wound up on yesterday’s DN.
25 It wasn’t much, but at such a late or early hour, it was pretty freaky, especially AFTER I had promised, “More to come”. I posted the two other photos of the students, but decided against posting them since four of them are possible DN readers.
26 If you are a DN reader who thinks the pics were of you, feel free to email me at gfharrington@aol.com. If you are, I will confirm with an attachment. If not, then I’ll just let you know. It was somewhere around 2004.
27 And it wasn’t that much, just that it all flew rapidly at me right after I had typed, “More to come.”
28 And even THAT and the orbs of Jobs wouldn’t have been noteworthy had it not been for my scrolling down to save all of it, only to see the number 19 in the lower left corner of yesterday’s DN. That was a sort of trifecta, and three things in a row ending with a number that contains a one and a nine was significant to me. Amazing odds.
29 Honestly? That happens periodically when I edit. Things jump around, and it’s a minor annoyance.
30 But after having written about all the strange occurrences of this week, and all of the odd, unrelated electrical things, it all really scared me. I closed my eyes and couldn’t really get back to sleep. Yes, sometimes this stuff scares me.
31 I remember closing my eyes and feeling like something was in the room yesterday early. It was dark. I usually blow stuff like that off, since I am an insomniac anyway.
32 But I heard a chair click, a “Heidi click”. I just got sort of Zen, and my insomniacal mantra is pretty simple: I just repeat the word “Sleep” as often as thoughts try to interrupt it. It works pretty well usually.
33 But yesterday it didn’t. I was actually pretty excited that so many things were happening at my new gig, and for years I have refused to chronicle any of it.
34 But electrical things have been happening at an alarming rate.
35 So I semi-slept and semi-stayed awake yesterday early. I remember hearing the click, then the things that normally go on by themselves: the heater, the clock radio, the beep on the coffemaker, etc. On the way to school I noticed other things that go on automatically, like stoplights, hall lights, clocks, etc. Amused by that thought, which actually seemed a little Disney, I eventually drifted off.
36 When I awoke, showered, had a little coffee, and made my way to school, I wasn’t thinking too much about any of this. I simply wanted to get to school because I was super-excited about the upcoming ghost stories, and the ending of The Sixth Sense.
37 In a not-so-ironic twist, students had to turn in their own ghost stories yesterday morning. When I got to school, I did my usual when things are due: I got out the stapler to make sure it was loaded so that the students could staple their rough drafts to their final copies.
38 The thought occurred to me that the way things were going, I probably didn’t have any staples. I went to my drawer. No staples. None. How often does anyone run out of staples? It’s almost an impossibility. But that’s been the week. I had to hurdle a few students in order to cross the hall and ask the same teacher from whom I had borrowed a power cord the day before for some staples.
39 Fortunately, she smiled and asked if I had any Band-Aids. I not only keep a healthy supply of Band-Aids, I have Hello, Kitty! Band-Aids. I dashed across the hall, got my Band-Aids, told my students to hold on, and ran back. She laughed, and on the way out the door I said, “The football players love these!” which is true. Two football players in her room looked at each other like, “What’d he say?” and looked pretty angry. The Band-Aids were pink. I think somewhere in there they felt I was insulting them, but really, it was a statement of fact. The football players get a kick out of those, but out of context, I may have stirred up some issue or other. Not my worry.
40 AnywayZ when I got back to my room, I had a small line of students whose printers at home had failed on them, a VERY common occurrence any time someone has a ridiculous deadline. Murphy’s law. This one is true in all walks of life. Fierce deadlines=computer/printer breakdowns. You know it. I know it. But I digress.
41 The students use thumb drives and emails to print when their printers decide to fail, which is usually any time a huge project is due.
42 My printer is old, slow, and reliable, like me.
43 But yesterday, the first student to use it raised her hand for help. The printer that has had only two or three severe paper jams in seven years pulled around twelve sheets into it, causing an enormous paper jam, and a delay in the line waiting to use it. Meanwhile, other students needed the stapler, and all was again chaos, two mornings in a row, and something either mechanical or electrical going wrong simultaneously.
44 We all laughed, because the students thought that ghosts had entered both my stapler and my printer. Ironically there was a picture of a ghost saying “Boo!” taped to the inside lid of the printer. If someone had accidentally pushed “print”, a ghost would have printed!
45 SO fun!
45 My next class had to watch the last minute or two of The Sixth Sense a second time, and then write their thoughts in a journal entry, while the end credits rolled to the somewhat disturbing musical score.
46 The room became eerily silent, but it was a nice break from all the craziness. Soon I heard giggles from the group sitting close to my desk. Their desks faced a window high up and across the room.
47 They were all looking up at the window, which had some sort of smokestack on the roof lit up by the sun. What they were looking at was a shadow play of a large crow, which looked exactly like a raven. You couldn’t see it; you could only see its shadow. With the strange music, they laughed and pointed. It was like holding up a sheet with a lamp behind it, only sunny.
48 The second I looked up, the music gave a slight shriek, and the shadow of the crow flew off. I swear to you. I never saw the crow, just the shadow. It was this perfect harmonious convergence of Poe, M. Night, and the Bruce Willis character Malcolm Crowe.
49 I couldn’t wait to see if my hall light was going to be on or off during fourth period, where a girl had noticed it had been coming on and going off every other day since the ghost unit began.
50 It was to be an off-day, and indeed, it was off. She came in and pointed it out to me first thing. We laughed.
51 Seventh period rolled around, the last period of the day. I related some of the events to the students, told them about how I was goofing earlier on inanimate objects that go on by themselves, and how I thought early in the morning of how many inanimate objects do that, when the bell rang.
52 A few students panicked. One needed to use the stapler, which I had fixed earlier in the day. It refused to work, and it once again jammed. Another student was frantically trying to print his ghost story, but the computer refused to let him. Another student asked me to check for a missing assignment on School Loop, so I really wanted to get to the computer and check that as soon as possible so I wouldn’t forget.
53 Just then, the fire alarm went off!
54 The teacher across the hall had yelled at the students to get out of the building. She shouted, “YOU GUYS! What if this is a REAL fire drill?” I told my students to leave the building also, but when they opened the door, all I heard was the tail end of her speech, which sounded like this: “This is a REAL fire drill!” I panicked, and walked up and down the hallway telling everybody that “This is a REAL fire drill! Leave the building at once!!!”
55 Other teachers heard me, and soon everyone was saying it was real.
56 When we got outside, all the teachers asked each other if there was a real fire, and it eventually traced back to me! I was embarrassed, but we all had a pretty fun laugh.
57 After school, I met with another teacher who teaches English 4. We exchanged information: he knows everything there is to know about world religions, so I asked him a bunch of stuff. I know tons about English grammar, on which he is a bit shaky.
58 I was trying to show him how clauses and phrases act as parts of speech, and I was going to simplify it with the simple sentence, “John threw the ball.” Before I said it, he said, “Oh, you mean like ‘He threw the ball.’ “
59 When I told him I was about to say “John threw the ball,” he laughed. “What are the odds of us coming up with practically the same exact sentence?” I asked.
60 Indeed.
61 We parted; I finally got home, texted Nicoley to to shopping, and we took off. I told her about the amazing coincidences with electrical things. On our way home, the stoplights on Calaveras started blinking on and off.
62 We detoured.
63 It was a great punctuation to an amazingly electrical day.
64 More to come.
65 Peace.
~H~
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